Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Conclusions

successful digital publishers make it their goal to answer as many readers’ questions as
possible.
This area of digital publishing is in rapid evolution. There are several industry
initiatives seeking to assemble and coordinate the content of publishers in vertical
search engines, Google and other popular search engines are also working to
incorporate more information from magazines and newspapers. Currently, it is far
more likely for readers searching the Internet to be presented a Wikipedia entry than an
article from the archives of respected magazines and newspapers. Even searches
launched in the Google news section often yield very shallow sets of results.
We believe that archives are important to the future of digital publishing and can be
monetized via subscriptions, fees, and advertising revenue.
New Opportunities
We believe that as the technologies for creating, delivering, and tracking digital editions
continue to evolve and as display technologies improve and become even more
portable, an increasing number of readers will begin to prefer subscribing to digital
editions of their favorite magazines and newspapers. This will also expand the number
and range of publications available in digital formats.
We expect to see a growth in smaller localized publications and expect to see more
technology providers offering “self-service” or SAAS-modeled services to make the costs
of providing digital editions more affordable. We also believe that the number of hybrid
periodicals/catalogs, advertorial publications, and custom publications will grow
significantly over the next few years. There will be increased opportunities for
publishers to deliver school editions in digital formats, as well as to license collections
of their content by itself or in conjunction with other content to provide readings for
high school and college courses.
The Final Word
It has been said that this is the most exciting time to be in publishing since Gutenberg
invented the printing press. The digital publishing era is in its early stages, and while
the innovation to date has been impressive, there are many new opportunities for
further innovation.
The technology will continue to get better; publishers will move to a true cross-media
publishing strategy; collaboration techniques will change the current authoring and
reviewing metaphors; online communities will become even more important to brand
building; and the population of “Web natives” will continue to increase, driving the
increased readership of digital editions. The future of this market is bright, and the
rewards for innovation will be substantial.
127
©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. http://gilbane.com